Floating in the Forth

When I first heard this song, it seemed more like a lament and the ponderance of someone obsessing over their plans to commit suicide after breaking up with their loved one.

In retrospect, it was a cookbook for something that he planned to do for another year and 10 years later, after the band's ironic success from the pains that inspired its music, we realize that the lyrics were the architecture of his obsession from the pains he felt from this experience and time only gave him more time to preponder how to most accurately carry out his sad vision.

The opening of the song is what a police boat sounds like when it cruises up the forth river. It even sounds like a heavy Ferry which more succinctly describes the metaphor of the gravity or heaviness of his heart as he ponders how to start the song. Perhaps after his loved one left him, he would day dream along the mouth where the Forth River meets the North Sea. This mouth swallowing what was left of his pride leaving him only with the pain of his obsessive thoughts of lonliness.

The first stanza, he essentially lays the rule which is that his soul died the day she left him. The spine collapsing is how his soul had already jumped off the forth road bridge and collided with the wall of the North Sea.

Based on that premise, the song is about a dead man talking to his audience in a comatose state of being. Scott Hutchinson has hinted many times that he wasn't too happy and that a "6 out 10" day was about as good as would ever get. 10 years of that of course makes the gravity of time release the hidden, pent up passions of his sadness that much heavier.

From the first stanza, he visualizes what he already feels: a dead man floating on the forth river We all thought that he had since healed thanks to the lyric "I think I'll save suicide for another day."

The second stanza has him seemingly simultaneously in two scenarios where he's heading to the site where he'll jump and take his life and whereby he's been recovered and is being taken away. Perhaps, by accepting the task of taking a cab or a vehicle to the bridge to jump, he is in a sense a living corpse in a metaphorical hearse.

The Forth Road Bridge is a rather dull, boring suspension bridge that does have pedestrian access to it and it is located on the A9000 which connects to M9 which connects to M8. This gives us information about the 2nd stanza which seems to be a road map from where he broke up with his lass to the bridge. The M8 heads towards Edinburgh which I believe that was where he lived when he was starving musician in his mid twenties. This could mean he felt he died before he even got to the bridge so the act was not really the death but the loss of his loved one represented his hopes and was thus the true funeral procession in his depressed mind's eye.

By the reference of the m8 and pointing out that to the North is a "Fife of mine" or a place that was special place to him, we most definitely have him looking to the other side of the bridge and realizing that the midway point on the bridge represented the purgatory he was in. Hell must've been Edinburgh where his heart was broken and Fife, the county on the other side of the bridge represented his hopes and dreams, who knows, maybe he met his girl over there? That's a secret he kept to himself from these lyrics, but perhaps in other lyrics, there might be light shed on that mystery.

The boat he imagines for him seems most logically to be that police boat that would retrieve his dead body.

The chorus ends into a sort of poetic "bridge" of sorts as he describes the feeling of the actual moment of him liberating himself from his sadness. The music has a manic sort of hopefulness that provides visions of chopping waves and gulls seemingly approving of his bold act of protest.

The song seems to end with him postponing this eventual act as he tells himself to gather his loose change (or mad thoughts) , shake it out like how a dog shakes off water from his fur and continue on living.

We see an astounding lyrical juxtaposition in that after the first stanza, he was negotiating his suicide with himself over the day; where in the final line, he saves suicide for another "year."

One final note, is in his imagery, he saw himself fully clothed as he floats away.

His final tweet mirrors this dark lyric when he told his fans, "I'm away now."

The tweet although it may have physically came from his fingers, it wasn't the Scott we all loved, but rather the dark thoughts that turned him into a zombie of sorts.

I think he is at peace now. He was such a funny individual, it's sort of hard to think that he held on to those thoughts so strongly.